Of the many twisted punishments that the DWP likes to hand out to JSA claimants, I’m thinking atm of the one where advisers make a claimant wait for days to find out if they will be sanctioned for missing a meeting or a supposed jobsearch transgression. Making people wait days or more to find out if they’re going to have any money for the next fortnight really is one of the perverted acts. You have to wonder about a bureaucracy that hands out that kind of thing.
Twice in the last couple of months I’ve spoken with a couple of people who said they were nervously awaiting the outcome of a decision about a potential sanction. Neither of these people had a) any idea whether or not their next JSA payment would be made and b) any real idea when they’d formally be told if they’d been sanctioned and for how long. They were told only that the outcome would be sent down by a decisionmaker of some variety at some point and that there was no point asking before then how things were progressing. I actually sat with one of these people as that person asked an adviser – plaintively, it must be said – if there was any news on a potential sanction for a missed meeting. That person was told a decision would be sent by letter. If there was no letter by the end of the next week or so, the person could assume that there was no sanction. Similar story for the second person, who has also been told to Wait And See.
I’m sure there’s an explanation for all of this to do with systems. Sadly for the DWP, I’m not interested in hearing it.
I have previously been advised by a former worker of the DHSS that in her days working there, claimants could pursue compensation if a system ‘error’ had got them into debt. Nowadays, the ideological hardening of the system and the debate against the claimant makes it difficult for us to think in such terms. Welfare Reform Minister Freud’s 2008 pronouncement as welfare reform guru to Labour — that 2/3 Incapacity Benefit claims were not legitimate — seems to predicate the outcomes of sickness and disability benefit decisions by the DWP. And so claimants are now assumed to be not legitimate until they contest the matter at tribunal. Personal Independence Payments and ‘additional evidence’.
Now, in the waiting time before a decision is announced to the claimant, it would seem that the claimant’s premature death is regarded as ‘a saving to the taxpayer’.
The jobcentre worker as ‘you will be informed in due time’ messenger might not be the decision maker, but perhaps they can act as two-way messenger when the claimant says to them, “Please inform the decision maker that I shall inform my MP of this matter before I hear the decision-maker’s decision”?
TheyWorkForYou.com has an online ‘find your MP by postcode’ form.
Dude Swheatie of Kwug
PS: “Those who give the order seldom see the mess it makes” and it seems to me that DWP Secretaries’ euphemistic official response to coroners’ guidance and Disability News Service probing seems to be one word repeated many times rather than two words. How a single word shows DWP has finally owned up on benefit deaths
At my local jobcentre a common trick when claimants denied DWP access to their Universal Jobmatch account, was to ‘raise a doubt’ about it.
The advisors knew perfectly well that the claimant was entitled to restrict access by ticking the ‘no-access’ check-box . Reluctantly provided by the DWP to accord with data-protection laws. They didn’t like this awkward fact, and so tried to be clever by raising the so-called ‘doubt’. It would take 4 weeks for the Decision Maker to confirm that the claimant could deny access to their account.
During this time no payment was made, and so the luckless claimant had in effect been deliberately sanctioned for a month, for refusing to co-operate with an illegal forced access to their UJ account.